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If you're looking to create that perfect multi-threaded, NFC, GPS-based OpenCL app (and who isn't?), but found your development board options too limited, Samsung has good news. It's just launched the Arndale community development board around its Exynos 5 Dual SoC, with the ARM Cortex-A15 dual-core CPU and ARM Mali T604 GPU. Those specs give the board "an order of magnitude lift in performance" from the last model and full profile OpenCL capability, according to Samsung, on top of NFC, GPS and camera sensor features. That'll let developers go to town on new games, security and multimedia apps next month for $250 -- if that's you, check the PR after the break or coverage below.

First impressions? This is a solid machine -- build quality and materials are fantastic for the price. It's also pleasantly thin and light, a boon for people who are used to carrying a laptop around every day. We're happy with the display which is bright and crisp. Viewing angles could use some improvement, but you'd be hard-pressed to find a better laptop screen at this price. The keyboard and trackpad feel great (we're coming from an 11-inch Core i7 MacBook Air), and two-finger scrolling works like a charm. Performance is somewhere between the original Atom-based Chromebooks and the current Celeron-equipped Series-5 model. The system didn't have any issues playing back 1080p content in YouTube, but we didn't get a chance try Hulu or NetFlix.

Ultimately, this is a phenomenal device for the price. If you're used to working in the cloud, you're basically getting 80 percent of the entry-level MacBook Air experience for a quarter of the price. Factor in the Google Now integration and 100GB of free Google Drive storage for two years and this latest Chromebook is a winner. Check out the gallery below and hit the break for our hands-on video.

Google just launched the latest iteration of its Chrome OS-based laptop here in San Francisco -- the $249 (or £229, for those in the UK) 11.6-inch Samsung Chromebook. It's ARM-based (fanless), 0.8-inches thick, weighs only 2.43 pounds, runs 6.5+ hours on battery, boots in under 10 seconds and supports 1080p video playback. Pre-orders start today at Amazon and PC World, and the laptop includes Google Now integration using Google Drive as a transport and comes with 100GB of free storage for two years. It will be available for sale on the Play Store and featured prominently at retailers like Best Buy, and naturally, we're expecting this one to make a bigger splash than prior models based on the bargain bin price alone.

Under the hood, there's a dual-core A15-based Samsung Exynos 5 Dual (5250) SoC, 2GB RAM, 16GB of built-in flash storage, WiFi a/b/g/n and Bluetooth, all of which should act to give this Chromebook a lot more oomph compared to slower, earlier models. Other specs include a 1366 x 768 native screen resolution, a USB 3.0 port, a USB 2.0 socket, combo headphone / mic jack, an SD card slot and a "full-size Chrome keyboard." Hit up the links below for the nitty-gritty, or hop on past the break for a promo vid.

Our SIGGRAPH demo of the ARM Mali-T604 GPU gave a brief preview of Samsung's upcoming Exynos 5 Dual CPU, but now all the details of the company's next great processor are ready for us to view. Other than that GPU which includes support for up to WQXGA (2,560 x 1,600) resolutions -- perfect for the 11.8-inch P10 mentioned in court filings -- and much more, the white paper uncovered by Android Authority also mentions support for features like Wi-Fi Display, high bandwidth LPDDR3 RAM running at up to 800MHz with a bandwidth of 12.8GBps, USB 3.0 and SATA III. It also claims the horsepower to decode 1080p video at 60fps in pretty much any codec, stereoscopic 3D plus handle graphics APIs like OpenGL ES 3.0 and OpenCL 1.1. All of this is comes courtesy of a dual-core 1.7GHz ARM Cortex-A15 CPU built on the company's 32nm High-K Metal Gate process and Panel Self Refresh technology that avoids changing pixels unnecessarily to reduce power consumption. There's plenty of other buzzwords and benchmarks floating around in the PDF, you can check them out in the PDF linked below or just sit back and see what tablets and phones arrive with one of these -- or the competition from Qualcomm's S4 and NVIDIA's Tegra -- inside starting later this year.

Think those are some pretty slick graphics in your Galaxy S III? Samsung's latest smartphone packs some mighty graphics prowess of its own, thanks to the Mali-400 MP GPU, but once you spend a few minutes with the Mali-T604, the company's next-generation chipset, the improvements become quite clear. After seeing the Mali-T604 in action, as we did at SIGGRAPH today, the capabilities leave us hopeful for the future, and perhaps feeling a bit self-conscious about the silicon currently in our pockets. The reference device on hand was operating in sync with a variety of unnamed hardware, protected from view in a relatively large sealed box. We weren't able to squeeze many details out of ARM reps, who remained mum about the demo components, including clock speed, manufacturer and even fabrication size. What we do know is that we were looking at a quad-core Mali-T604 and dual-core ARM Cortex-A15 processor, with a fabrication size in the range of "28 to 40 nanometers" (confirming the exact size would reveal the manufacturer). Clock speed is also TBD, and the early silicon on demo at the show wasn't operating anywhere close to its top end.

In order to experience the T604, we took a look at three demos, including Timbuktu 2, which demonstrates elements like self shadowing and depth of field with OpenGL ES 3.0, Hauntheim, which gives us an early look at physics simulation and HDR lighting with OpenCL, and Enlighten, which rendered silky smooth real-time illumination. You can see all of the demos in action after the break, and you can expect T604-equipped devices to make their debut beginning later this year -- ARM says its working with eight manufacturers to get the licensed tech to market as early as Q3.

Update: ARM has just confirmed to us that this reference device is running off an Exynos 5 Dual chip (up to 1.7GHz), which means the following video is also a heads-up on what Sammy has in store for us in its forthcoming devices.